Davanda's literature of comics and the graphic narrative Blog

I think the jazz influences help enhance the experience of the comic. I really enjoy how the music only helps enhance the story of the comic. For example, in the stork exchange having the jazz there helps bring more life to the main characters and the inanimate objects. If you mute the video the actions of each character is dampened. The easiest example of this is at the beginning of the animation when Krazy is flying in the air and he flies past the plane to have the plane catch up with him. Without song it's not as impactful when Krazy yells at the plane to catch up. Also his “voice” is lost as well. With the piano pounding out each note when he yells gives him more anger than what is drawn. The jazz I feel makes watching/reading his comics even more enjoyable. The comics themselves have a different type of jazzy vibe. The way the paneling enhanced the story telling gave the comic that jazzy feel. I really love how the simplicity of the drawings made it easy to relate to Krazy or...

When seeing the ethnic and racial stereotyping warning at the top of this week, I felt challenged to only read the racist ones. I wanted to see the darkside of popular comic artists as well as comparing how far we have as a society in recognizing what is wrong with these comics statements/jokes. Will it be fun to read things targeting my race or other colors races, no. but i think it will be important not to just ignore just because it might hurt me or anyone i care about a bit. There are always exceptions to the rule but I know the majority of people in this school and the world will not believe in the racism in the comics I pick. I'll start with Katzenjammer’s revenge since it starts with extremely racist depictions of the caribbean peoples. It's interesting to see that these people are seen as “cannibals” for wearing clothes that are more comfortable or a part of a different religious culture.  Of course this depiction is blown out of proportion to create a laugh at the unc...

When i was younger i used to read a lot of novels and other books. I never touched comics until I was mid way through middle school. Comics in my household were seen as “not really reading” or just a bunch of pictures with some words here and there. So I kept on reading regular fantasy books and drawing my own pictures. I did try reading a few superhero comics but I felt they were boring and too formulaic. As well as, I didn't like how Superman was drawn. Luckily for me I had a friend who introduced me to manga and non superhero comics. We had to get her mom to drive us into Boston to find a newbury comic for some interesting indie comics. I always thought that me liking comics was because it was easier to read than a regular book. But after reading Understanding Comics to understand comics, I truly understood why I did like comics/manga so much more than regular books (sometimes). Instead of me reading every action and emotion a character would have in a book. In a comic I could ...

This story set is pretty confusing to me. I feel like the first story The Roosters Laughter is a bit easier to gain some sort of analysis from. To me the Roosters feel like a story about necromancy. The first image is a woman dancing/giving power over to a normal sized rooster. Maybe the dancing woman is in charge of taking care of the rooster while it's young. I'm also assuming the dancing lady is the same lady that is in the grave by panel three. In between the first few panels the rooster is developing into a “normal” sized human/rooster person and is all grown up by the time the woman dies. I also think the rest of this story is the original rooster trying to revive his dead female caretaker. Since lots of dead females are shown near scientific instruments or tied up on tables I think the rooster is trying to experiment on the women. The original rooster eventually fails and either kills himself or is killed by another. The roosters or formal humans rejoice about his death...

  I really enjoy how detailed yet soft the marksmanship is compared to the comic topic of the hardships of imigration into america. I feel like the environment using a whimsical semi realistic take on his journey to assimilating to america really makes it easier to understand how it feels to be an immigrant at this time period. I also enjoyed how the author used small squares to signify the small actions the main character was taking. The small squares help you focus on small details on the main character that help create more of a story without having to rely on just using facial expressions to tell the story. I also love how any words that would be in english are basically wingdings or a group of random symbols. The one frame i really enjoy is the frame where a person is getting his beard cut and there are a bunch of snails on the ground. All of them have point hats that contrast the rounded shapes of the snails. To me this frame shows how strange it must be for the main characte...

I've only learned about comics history through a segment of my highschool history class. I learned about the different stages of comic history and all about the superhero comics. Since my teacher really liked superhero comics I learned a bunch about my teachers favorite comics rather than the history. Luckily for me my teacher told us about Hearst's first comic “the yellow kid.” Being able to re learn about Hearst's first comic being about yellow journalism is really interesting to me. I completely forgot that his comic was about over speculation of journalism. Before Hearst posted the yellow boy comic, I personally feel like so many interesting events happened that he could have picked instead of just talking about journalism. For instance the first international olympic games, the first ford car was made, it was an election year, Plessy v. Ferguson aka "separate but equal" passed the supreme court, as well as a bunch of natural disasters all happened in the US i...